Switch - Chip Heath [46]
Next, you’re asked to guess his IQ.
You’re part of a psychology experiment, and you object to the absurdity of the request. I don’t know anything about that guy. He just came into a room and read a report. It wasn’t even his report—you gave it to him to read! How am I supposed to know his IQ!?
Reluctantly, you make a wild guess. Separately, Fake Weatherman is asked to guess his own IQ. Who made a better guess?
Amazingly, you did, even though you know nothing about Fake Weatherman. Two psychologists, Peter Borkenau and Anette Liebler, from Universität Bielefeld in Germany, conducted this experiment, and they found that the strangers’ IQ predictions were better than the predictions of those whose IQ was being predicted—about 66 percent more accurate.
To be clear, it’s not so much that you’re a brilliant predictor; it’s that he’s a lousy self-evaluator. We’re all lousy self-evaluators. College students do a superior job predicting the longevity of their roommates’ romantic relationships than their own.
Savor, for a moment, the preposterousness of these findings. Fake Weatherman has all the information, and you’ve got none. He’s got decades of data—years’ worth of grades, college entrance exam scores, job evaluations, and more. Fake Weatherman should be the world’s foremost expert on Fake Weatherman!
If self-evaluation hinged on information alone, the findings of these studies would have been impossible. It’d be like discovering that you could beat randomly selected mothers on a trivia question about how many kids they have.
But self-evaluation involves interpretation, and that’s where the Elephant intrudes. The Elephant tends to take the rosiest possible interpretation of the facts. (“My 2.1 GPA is a sign of my intelligence—it shows that my intellect simply isn’t being challenged enough to keep me engaged.”)
We’ve all heard the studies showing that the vast majority of us consider ourselves above-average drivers. In the psychology literature, this belief is known as a positive illusion. Our brains are positive illusion factories: Only 2 percent of high school seniors believe their leadership skills are below average. A full 25 percent of people believe they’re in the top 1 percent in their ability to get along with others. Ninety-four percent of college professors report doing above-average work. People think they’re at lower risk than their peers for heart attacks, cancer, and even food-related illnesses such as salmonella. Most deliciously self-deceptive of all, people say they are more likely than their peers to provide accurate self-assessments.
Positive illusions pose an enormous problem with regard to change. Before people can change, before they can move in a new direction, they’ve got to have their bearings. But positive illusions make it hard for us to orient ourselves—to get a clear picture of where we are and how we’re doing. How can we dispel people’s positive illusions without raining down negativity on them?
6.
One way of cutting through positive illusions is suggested by an example from Massachusetts in a state agency called the Department of Youth Services. DYS dealt with delinquent kids—it was both a corrections agency and a social service organization. In the late 1970s, Massachusetts led a pioneering effort to overhaul its juvenile justice system, scaling back its youth prisons in favor of a network of nonprofits—halfway houses, group homes, outpatient counseling centers, job centers, and more. The goal of these nonprofits was to rehabilitate young offenders and keep them in their home communities.
As Massachusetts embraced this network model, DYS had to change substantially. The agency started working primarily through vendors—such as halfway houses and counseling centers—rather than delivering services to kids directly. As a result, agency staffers had to adapt the way they worked, and most of them handled the transition well.
Except for the accounting department.
The head of accounting was an authoritarian manager who ruled his department with an iron fist. He was known as